Haftorah This Week
Welcome to Haftorah This Week, the place where you will find thoughts and reflections by CLAL faculty and associates on this week's Haftorah.
HAFTARAT VAYECHI
(I Kings 2:1-12)
Rarely do we readily read the rantings of a respected leader as he is escorted from office or from the courtroom for the last time. In fact, most readers of papers or journals prefer not to read all that is said upon a deathbed or is uttered upon conviction, precisely because we don't truly want to know our leaders (or ourselves) when their (our) defenses are down. Thus we prefer to hear the televised soundbyte, and not witness the cursing as the last boxes are carted out. Nor, after their downfall, do we wish to recall the subtleties of their struggles.
The harsh selection of the opening lines of chapter two of Kings for a Haftarah reading allows us no such luxury. True, King David upon his deathbed holds the center of the stage by uttering to Solomon: "I am going the way of all the earth; be strong and show yourself a man. Keep the charge of the Lord your God, walking in His ways, and following His laws." But quickly does David fall to the common way, lashing out from his deathbed at the memory of an old opponent: "So do not let him go unpunished, for you are a wise man and you will know how to deal with him and send his gray hair down to Sheol in blood."
This is certainly not a morale builder for the modern Jewish reader. Our shock is due to our hope that the deathbed [David's or ours] would be a time of peaceful reflection, and certainly one of nonviolence. To continue to struggle with enemies--real and imagined--at the last moment of consciousness is to miss the larger opportunity of setting right our relations so that there is no continuing spiral of older family and societal conflicts after our deaths. The editor of the story of Kings knew that we are not easily drawn to such reflection: hence the tabloid technique of promising us a telling revelation from the real David. But let us conclude with the re-examining of our own shock that a great leader would revert to violent ravings upon his demise. We, who might have hoped that David, the builder of Jerusalem, would utter guiding words of nonviolence as his last testament, should ask ourselves why those imagined words would have any more effect upon us than these words left to us by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in a 1963 television interview:
There are many people who will accept nonviolence as the most practical response to be used in a social situation, but would not go to the point of seeing the necessity of accepting nonviolence as a way of life.... I think that nonviolent resistance is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom and human dignity. It was a way of disarming the opponent. It exposes his moral defenses. It weakens his morale and, at the same time, it works on his conscience.
(John Schecter)
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